Category: Oracle

I’ve been in Charles de Gaulle airport for about three hours now. Only another four to go…

I tried to record another technical video, but you can hear kids in the background. Now the timings are sorted, it should be pretty quick to re-record when I get to a hotel, so that’s good I guess. I’m not sure I can face doing another one today.

I’m about to board a flight to Paris, where I will wait for 7 hours before starting my 14 hour flight to Montevideo, Uruguay. I think you can probably guess how I’m feeling at this moment…

Why won’t someone hurry up and invent a teleport device?

I will probably put out little posts like this along the way, just so friends and family know what is going on. It’s wrong to wish your life away, but I’m really not looking forward to the next 20+ hours…

Hopefully I will get power in Paris, so I can do some stuff on my laptop…

I put out a brief video a few days ago (re-uploaded today to fix typos) about my participation in the OTN Tour of Latin America (2015). I’ll be on the southern leg this year. Sorry to those countries who make up the northern leg. I will be back soon I hope.

“@oraclebase Thanks for letting us know. I have filed bug# 21463521 and fixed it for 5.0.2″

We’re a week on now and all our APEX installations are happily running 5.0.1. We had no issues with the upgrades and no problems with the apps.

We are small fry where APEX is concerned, so don’t take this as the green light to upgrade everything yourself. I’m just saying we had no problems with it, which is pretty cool. If APEX is a strategic environment for you, you will probably need to do a lot more testing than us.

These are all listed as 12c new features in the 1Z0-060 “Upgrade to Oracle Database 12c” OCP upgrade exam, which I find a bit odd. Two of them are EM12c features, not database features. The other two are existing EM12c features that are now available directly from the database, but I can’t see myself ever using them on the server when it is much easier to do it from Cloud Control. Whatever!

Getting close to the end of the OCP syllabus now… I’ll soon have to consider sitting the exam…

Invariably, us conference types start to have a bit of a moan about being rejected, hence my little jibe #TeamRejectedByOracleOpenWorld. In case people lost sight of this being a joke, here was one of my tweets on the subject.

The reaction to these tweets is quite interesting, because some in the community are stunned by the people getting rejected. In reality it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Jonathan Lewis summed the situation up nicely with the following tweet.

“You’re confusing OOW with a user group event. Different organisations, reasons, and balance”

If I’m honest, presenting is not high on my list of desires where OpenWorld is concerned. There is too much to do anyway, without having to worry about preparing for talks. If someone asks me to get involved in a panel session, RAC Attack or some similar thing I’m happy to help out, but if I do none of the above, I will still be rushed off my feet for a week.

The Oracle ACE program is allocated a few slots each year. Some people need to present or their company won’t allow them to attend. Others want the “profile” associated with presenting at OpenWorld. Neither of these things affect me, so I typically don’t submit for the ACE slots. I would rather see them go to someone who really does want them. I get plenty of opportunities to speak.

If you really want to speak at conferences, your focus should be on user group events. Getting to speak at something like OOW can be a nice treat for some people, but it probably shouldn’t be your goal.

If you’ve followed me on Twitter you will have seen me posting links to videos on my YouTube channel. You can see me talking about starting the channel in the first video.

One week and 5 videos in and I’ve just hit 50 subscribers. Watch out PewDiePie!

One thing I didn’t mention in that video was my hopes/expectations as far as subscribers are concerned. As I said in one of my writing tips posts, Oracle is a niche subject on the internet. If you put out some half-decent content on a YouTube gaming or fitness channel, you would probably expect to get a few thousand subscribers fairly quickly. That’s not the case for an Oracle channel. Before I started this YouTube channel I did a little research and the biggest Oracle-related channel I could find was about 30,000 subscribers and that was Oracle’s main YouTube channel. After that some were knocking around 1000-4000 subscribers. Below that were a bunch of channels that were pulling double or triple figures of subscribers. Starting an Oracle-related channel is *not* a good idea if your master plan is to dominate YouTube!

OK. With that bullshit out of the way, how have I found my first week?

Making YouTube videos is hard! It takes a long time. I’m estimating about 1 hour of effort per minute of footage. The first 3 minute video took 3 days, but that included learning the technology and getting to grips with editing. Hopefully I’ll get a bit slicker as time goes on.

Doing the vocal for a video is a nightmare. After a certain number of retakes your voice ends up sounding so flat you start to wonder if you are going to send people to sleep. I listen back to my voice on some of the videos and it makes me cringe. It’s monotone and devoid of personality (insert insult of your choice here). As I get better at the recording thing, I’m hoping the number of retakes will reduce and my vocal will sounds less like I’m bored shitless.

I love the fact I can do “quick” hit-and-run videos and not feel guilty about not including every detail. I’m putting links back to my articles, which contain more detail and most importantly links back to the documentation, so I’m happy that these videos are like little tasters.

I’m being a bit guarded about the comments section at the moment. When I look at other channels, their comments are full of spam and haters. I can’t be bothered with that. I’ll see how my attitude to comments develops over time.

I’m hoping to do some beginner series for a few areas, which I will build into playlists. This probably won’t be of much interest to regular followers of the blog and website, but it will come in handy for me personally when I’m trying to help people get started, or re-skilled into Oracle. I might be doing some of that at work, hence my interest.

I’ve tried to release a burst of videos to get the thing rolling, but I don’t know how often I will be able to upload in future. Where Oracle is concerned, the website is my main priority. Then the blog. Then the conference thing. Then YouTube. The day job and general life have to fit in around that somewhere too. This is always going to be a labour of love, not a money spinner, so I have to be realistic about what I can achieve.

So there it is. One week down. Five videos. Four cameos by other members of the Oracle community. Superstardom and wealth beyond my wildest dreams are just around the corner… Not!

The first session was on “Five Hints for Optimizing SQL”. The emphasis was very much on “shaping the query plan” to help the optimizer make the right decisions, not trying to determine every single join and access structure etc.

In the past I’ve seen Jonathan do sessions on hints, which made me realise how badly I was using them. As a result of that I found myself a little scared by them and gravitating to this “shaping” approach, but my version was not anywhere near as well thought out and reasoned as Jonathan’s approach. It’s kind-of nice to see I was on the right path, even if my approach was the mildly pathetic, infantile version of it.

The break consisted of food, chatting and loads of prizes. It’s worth coming even if you don’t want to see the sessions, just to get a chance of winning some swag. Everyone also got to take home a Red Stack Tech mug, stress bulb and some sweets as well.

The second session was on “Creating Test Data to Model Production”. I sat there smugly thinking I knew what was coming, only to realise I had only considered a fraction of the issues. I think “eye opening” would be the phrase I would use for this one. Lots of lessons learned!

I must say, after nearly 20 years (19 years and 11 months) in the game, it’s rather disconcerting to feel like such a newbie. It seems to be happening quite a lot recently.

So that was another great event! Many thanks to Jonathan for taking the time to come and speak to us. Hopefully we’ll get another visit next year? Well done to Mike for keeping this train rolling. Wonderful job! Thanks to all the sponsors of the prize draw and of course, thanks to Red Stack Tech for their support, allowing the event to remain free! Big thanks to all the members of the Oracle Midlands family that came out to support the event. Without your asses on seats it wouldn’t happen!

The upgrade documentation is quite extensive and the prerequisites are going to be different depending on the database and cloud control versions you are starting with, so this is no way a “recommended” way to do the upgrade. Each one will need to be approached on a case-by-case basis. It’s just meant to give a flavour of what you have to do.